Nonfiction

The unforeseen arrived on an autumn day some twenty years ago in Canberra, Australia. I had been living there for fifteen years, having immigrated from the U.S. to spend my life with a man I had met on a train in

The toilet was lidless, its porcelain chipped and stained, squatting in the middle of what would become the kitchen of the place that somehow was going to be our family home. The year I first saw it was 1968, the Second Summer of Love, which really wasn’t about love, not in the New York of garbage strikes, the shooting of Andy Warhol, and the rioting in Morningside Park.

My dead dad’s ashes are kept inside an arcade game. Well, technically he’s my stepdad, and his ashes are kept inside an urn. But the urn is stashed in Star Castle, and Star Castle is stashed in Gamezone, and Gamezone is stashed in Lanford, New Hampshire, which is at least an hour away from my dead dad’s (empty) grave plot.

My dad tells us about the Hindenburg while we’re following the Goodyear blimp on our way to the dump. We’re in the back seat of the old red Saab, my brother and me, strapped into our super-duper seatbelt contraptions, the ones my dad bought at Sears, the ones that crisscross over our chests and pin us there to the cracked vinyl seats, the seats that smell of my dad’s Vantage cigarette smoke, cut with the spice of the pink Canada mints he keeps up near the emergency brake.

The words staring up at me from the iPhone bubble strike me mute. 

No quaver. No cracking voice. Still, the sterile stream of alphabet contains a rip in the fabric of reality. No, the soundless words don’t contain the rip, they launch it. Like a rocket. It starts inside me, silent, and spreads outward like a new kind of bleeding. Absent all sound— except my own sharp inhale.  My own croaking throat. No words. Just a gasp holding a sligh

I write about dreams, mother-dreams.
She died January 21st, 2023.
I do not weep for her.
I weep for me.

one.

When I was a junior in college, a friend handed me a copy of When Women Were Birds by Terry Tempest Williams. We’d been intimate with each other’s obsessions and sleep schedules, sharing a bed to save money, hardly ever using it at the same time.

At the end of “Barbie,” different models through time flash on the movie screen alongside the credits. It was then that I remembered I own a Barbie.

Dear Ethel,

I lost your ring.
It was the only thing of yours we had, other than the letters you and Julius exchanged.

In the beginning, they were like goldfish, barely visible as they floated beneath the surface of the tepid bathwater. It was Sunday in England, the day we had a bath.

For Japanese Americans, today, February 19, is the Day of Remembrance, when we look back to 1942 when President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066; this proclamation removed 120,000 Japanese Americans from the West Coast and put them in concentration camps in desolate areas of the West and South.

I sank into the red sofa, too heavy to stand again. A small wooden table in front of me held a few books and my computer, connected to the TV by an HDMI cord.

A large, gold-framed portrait photograph of my maternal great-grandfather dominates one wall of the attic room where I write. With increasing frequency, I find myself musing about the similarities and differences between us.

Several years ago, I bought some coffee filters, and after opening the pack, I realized they were the wrong size for my Mr. Coffee, too small. I held the ripped-open package of 100 coffee filters (now 99) and faced a quandary.

In his essay “Arendt in New York,” in our Winter 2017 issue, selected for inclusion in Best American Essays, Baron Wormser wrote “She has witnessed rant that silenced every reproof. She has waited for some larger affirmation to arise, the vision of decency, but none came.”

Monument Valley was the properly mythic place for meeting this mythic event, a solar eclipse. 

When I first saw Nestor, he was sitting in a wrought-iron chair in the hibiscus–filled courtyard of Havana’s Dulce María Loynaz Cultural Center.

I witnessed a livestreamed genocide, 

From the brick in my hand.

Reckoning (n): a count, computation, calculation

A day before the long drive to Northampton, where I would join friends in a book talk about war and language, I arrived at a small town emergency room, signed in, took a seat, and for the next half hour mulled over what had led me there.

The first time I saw the Saguenay River it was nighttime. I was driving along the north shore of the St. Lawrence River and stopped at Tadoussac where the road is connected by a car ferry.

I was teaching seventh-grade Humanities in New York City when the first plane hit. 

The recent inferno at Louisiana’s Nottoway Plantation has unleashed a firestorm (no pun intended) of controversy. Memes abound on social media where Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, and ghosts of the formerly enslaved watch the fire burn in vindicated satisfaction.

Your husband and you lean over the edge, rooftop parking. Both of you panting, him holding his side. Bags from holiday shopping strewn near your feet. You watch four men meet in the center of the street below as if each of them advanced from designated corners of a boxing ring.

After ten years away the old ground looked about the same. Exposed bedrock of red sandstone and limestone, juniper-piñon woodlands. Oak brush, pads of prickly pear, claret cup and hedgehog cactus with their explosive yellow blossoms.

The intersection of Proctor, Boston, and Bridge Streets in Salem, Massachusetts is drab. A Dunkin Donuts spreads its pink and beige cheer; there’s an empty fenced-in lot with a coating of rubble, a three-family brick building, and a Walgreens, fringed with a parking lot. It’s an area no one has bothered to spruce up; the businesses will do their business regardless.

“Post-traumatic stress is the result of a fundamental reorganization of the central nervous system based on having experienced an actual threat of annihilation (or seeing somebody else being annihilated), which reorganizes self experience…and the interpretation of reality.” –Bessell van der Kolk, The Body Keeps The Score   “The more catastrophic events we’re exposed to as

I loved the first season of Survivor. We watched it, I think, when Graham was barely five. It was about the time we forced marched him along the Wissahickon Creek. Maybe we’d just moved to Philadelphia, or maybe we were in Belchertown. Anyhow, it was exciting to see people who would never choose to be

For decades, I hid the fact that my family operated a Thai restaurant. Whenever someone asked what my parents did for a living, I’d respond with a vague non-answer: “Um, I just have my mom and grandmom, and they work in the food industry.” Over time, I developed a knack for stalling and redirecting, posing

My Yale professor who taught the history of Southeast Asia described the Mekong River as one of the most fertile. The monsoon causes the river water to rise above the trees, and when it recedes, numerous fish hang from the trees along the river. When my small airplane from Bangkok flew low over the Mekong River

  Rhododendron bushes frame our little family group in a series of photographs: my mother, brother, sister-in-law, their baby, my boyfriend, and me. The bushes are filled with full, lush blossoms of red and white; glossy, deep blue-green leaves form a backdrop for those constellations of blooms. Before taking photographs in front of the rhododendrons,

Friday, October 11, 1991, 11:30am Anita Hill’s voice streamed from the RCA. Dressed in what would become her iconic teal linen suit, she spoke her testimony into a microphone on a table draped with a green table skirt where she sat alone facing fourteen white men who comprised the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. Her

Nelson was there to teach me about the world. I’d wandered into the music department freshman week in college, looking for a challenging course to take. Nelson taught Music 13, which was advanced music theory with lots of sight singing and dictation, and word was he was a tough grader, so you had to show

My father, mother, older brother, and I are spending the night on the roof. I’m four in this first memory, and we live in India, where it’s too hot to sleep inside, but out here, the air is dark and warm and soft and big, not too much of anything. And neither am I. Our

What was I thinking back then? That my professors wouldn’t take attendance, that I was finally away from home and I had time – plenty of time – and that people would never actually notice I wasn’t ever where I was supposed to be, or would fail to see that I was driving Peter’s orange

Everyone who has ever left New York signs their presence with a trace. The trace is the signature of what escapes when you absent yourself, when you’ve ghosted the city but marked your X in all the old familiar places which will now dream your dreams, disrupt your presence, and haunt your comings and goings

One day when I was in high school, I noticed there appeared an old photograph on the dining room table at my grandparents’ house. Thin and brittle, it was pressed under the glass cover of the table and looked out of place against the red plaid tablecloth. It showed a family of four. There was

I don’t know his name, or what crime he was accused of, or whether he was guilty. We’re told that he composed a poem moments before the executioner’s blade fell. This suggests such remarkable equanimity that I find myself wondering if the sparse details I have about this event are reliably rooted in what happened.

Say I begin with midsummer. July with the humidity thicker than a slice of wedding cake, and everyone acting less sane because of it. The chatter of crows loitering on powerlines that sag above the asphalt. The annoyance of a world ashamed of its own hubris. How I keep trying to be poetic, but then,

Israel was supposed to save us. All of my grandparents, I knew, had fled to the US from Poland/Russia/Ukraine/Belarus—wherever, the borders were always changing—to escape pogroms, conscription, and the impossibility of making a living. The impossibility of living. My grandfather’s mother, in Ukraine, died of hunger during the Stalinist famine—this I only surmised as an

Who are my people? Chinese, Americans, mothers, physicians, none felt like the definition as much as a stranger I saw one day on the other side of the street.   1. I had been complaining I didn’t know what to write. Except I did know. I also knew why I pretended not to know. I

My father and I struggled to have conversations that didn’t involve silence and awkwardness. I held contempt for him abandoning me when I was a kid, for being absent most of my life. I don’t know my father very well. At fifty years old, I presume I never will. Immense pain was buried in my

My son is born in the morning in early September as blue-black shadows recede, gently pushed aside by the burgeoning dawn streaming through the windows of our tiny studio apartment on 7th street. That morning I step into the world a New Man and I ride my racing-red single speed with its carefree drop handles

On April 20th, twenty-five years ago, I underwent a midterm abortion in New York. The choice was not mine. I had just returned from serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Niger, West Africa. Those three sentences have taken several decades to write. Trauma is like that. It never actually leaves the

Actually, two Robins. On the hood of an old Jeep by our garage. I found them aligned head to foot, on their backs, wings folded. They lay as if placed there by someone: side by side, not a feather askew, stone cold dead.  There was no sign of trauma, just a little blood at each

This is not my mother’s eulogy. She’s not dead. In fact, today she tells me (in a very lively voice) to put the two on the three. She tells me this four times before I tell her that I can’t because both the two and the three are red. “They are?” she asks, leaning forward

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.          

This piece is part of our Winter 2023 print issue, available for purchase here.

How long have I in bondage lain,
And languished to be free!
Alas! and must I still complain–
Deprived of liberty.

  The sharp staccato of Cantonese swirled around Ming’s Restaurant as twelve of us sat, shoulders almost touching, at a round banquet table. Steam billowed from the swinging kitchen doors, wafting a seductive scent of steamed buns and ginger. For a moment I was a child again, going to yum cha with my parents after

  I’m lying on my back, scrawny feet up in the stirrups. In my head, I go like, don’t look, don’t look, don’t you look at her, but of course, I do. I raise my head, and there next to the gynecologist is Mom, peering into my most private me. Mom cranes her neck over

Typewritten pages buried in an obscure book. Yellowing, unlined, composed by my mother with penciled corrections in her hand, they told family history in fits and starts, gleaned from my grandmother’s memory. On a wintry day, they fell out of the book so I sat on the floor to read them because my mother’s voice

I.   Because you are only 5 feet 1.5 inches tall, and your limbs only stretch so far. You often speed-walk to keep pace with anyone over 6 feet.   Because your family tells you that you didn’t drink enough milk while you were growing up.   Because you hate the taste of it. As

Rain splattered against our bedroom window on a chilly spring weekend morning. I burrowed deeper under the thick cotton comforter, tightened my arms around my husband’s trim waist, and rubbed the lingering wetness of tears on my cheekbones off on his soft sleep T-shirt. That morning, I didn’t want to be comforted or to comfort.

When I pick up my 9-year-old daughter from school, the first thing she does, as soon as she clambers up onto the backseat and dumps her heavy backpack aside, is to squeeze her petit torso between the two front seats and, like a trained parakeet, bend her head to offer me my bribe, a kiss

The test was supposed to be a precaution. I had an IUD, but my period had been light that month, only a few drops of blood. When I put the white stick on the counter, two lines appeared instantly. I was pregnant. This was in the bathroom, in our house in South Philly. A floor-to-ceiling

Water Richard Halliburton (1900–1939) In February of 1995, when I was four-and-a-half years old, my mother had a nightmare. In her dream, she was at Rockaway Beach with her mother and me – three generations – and I waddled through the sand toward the waves. When she reminisces, my mother mentions the weather first, how

1 I think of letters as faces. 2 You want that E to look like it’s uppercutting somebody. 3 Back in the day in Chicago, gangs used to have gang cards—almost like a business card—and there were all sorts of dope logos and images and especially lettering. 4 By the way a person writes, you

Last summer I climbed an English hill my seven-year-old son said I shouldn’t. On a family road-trip across the United Kingdom, while walking around a sparkling, oval tarn in the verdant Lake District, we reached a fork. So far, we had strolled past giant oaks and leafy copses, quaint fences, and mellow glades—a pleasant enough

My thoughts won’t turn off long enough to let me fall asleep, so I watch dog agility competitions in bed on my phone. After watching dog after dog attempt the same course, and inevitably commit the same errors in the same places, my eyes start to grow heavy. I know to let another dog or

Ghosts Years ago, I found a picture of my mother and father with their first-born son. Tommy is perhaps two years old, balanced on my father’s knee. All three look straight at the camera and smile, dressed in their fifty’s finery. They appear to be in a photography studio, posing for a family portrait. But

Writing While Parenting Ben Berman Able Muse Press ISBN: 978-1-77349-111-0 One might think a book titled Writing While Parenting would be filled with tips about time- and stress management, about how to straddle the competing demands of parenthood and authorship, but the brief, incisive, funny, profound, and memorable essays in Ben Berman’s book offer us

The Beloved Republic Steven Harvey Wandering Aengus Press, 2023 “The beech tree rising in our bow window finds its own shape without any help from me.” So begins “A Whole Life” Steven Harvey’s preface that, like the taproot of the tree, anchors the collection of essays in The Beloved Republic. Written over a quarter of

During our first week of class Alysia Abbott asked “If your memoir was made into a movie, what actor or actress would play you?” The next week, all ten of us memoirists came back with our answers: Salma Hayek, Annette Bening, Claire Danes, Sigourney Weaver… It was June 2021 and I had just embarked on

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

This piece is part of our Winter 2022 print issue, available for purchase here.

You held my eyes from the back of Advanced Studies of Dramatic Literature as if you were a tousled debauchee from an unrated foreign film, the kind with a sophisticated plot line, sure, but also plenty of straps, leather, and velvet. Years after our son’s autism diagnosis and days after your own, we sit at

We sit in a line on a bench in Washington Square Park, my first son, me, my second son. Suitcases flank us—two of us are headed to the train station and on back home. One of us will stay here in the city of his birth. I can’t hear their voices because what I’m thinking

A former public-school teacher, she was fluent in multiple languages and said she had a graduate degree. Born into the post-war prosperity of the 1950s, she was raised in an upscale San Francisco neighborhood, three generations of her family in the same single-family Edwardian, recently valued at up to four-million dollars. Her father had been